It hardly seems appropriate to describe a man's passing as "tragic" when he had lived for nearly a century, encompassing a life as rich and rewarding as had the man christened Eugenio Saraceni, who died at 97 last week, but like a few other people I know, I'd been praying that the old man would make it through September.

Four months from now the 1999 renewal of the Ryder Cup will be played at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, roughly 50 miles from Worcester, where the first Ryder Cup was contested 72 years earlier. Gene Sarazen was the event's last surviving competitor.

In the process of researching the 1927 matches at the Worcester Country Club earlier this year, I'd tracked down Sarazen at his winter home in Naples, Florida, and left a message on his answering machine. A few days later, his daughter Mary Ann phoned back. She explained that her Dad had his good days and bad days. I was welcome to keep phoning in the hope of catching him on one of the former, she said, or, alternatively, I could fax her a list of specific questions which she would put to Sarazen at what she deemed appropriate times. This is what I did.

There were, of course, no esoteric tabulations of `Ryder Cup points' in those early days. The make-up of the visiting team was determined by Harry Vardon, James Braid, and J.H. Taylor, who had been appointed as selectors by the British PGA. The American selection process was more informal. Walter Hagen had been named to captain the American side and had recalled Sarazen, "Hagen just picked the team from among his golfing buddies.

"I suppose I'd have been automatically qualified," said Sarazen. "I'd already won a US Open and a PGA, but most of us who played on the team that first year were friends and continued to be friends on and off the course."

Although Sarazen was the last surviving player, eye witnesses remain. Fred Hill, now 88, caddied for The Squire that week. Frank Hickey, 87, caddied for Ted Ray, who replaced Abe Mitchell as captain when the latter, suffering from appendicitis, was left behind in England.

"He and Hagen were both former caddies themselves," added Hill. "They were such rivals for the spotlight they'd sometimes push each other off the tees if there was a camera around."

On the eve of the matches, it became clear that while the Americans wanted to be good hosts, they had no intention of becoming the first country to lose the Ryder Cup.

A delegation from the US PGA met with Ray and British team manager George Philpot with four proposals to amend the rules of competition. The original understanding of the rules, as formulated by Ryder, had called for the matches to precisely follow the format of the Walker Cup, which had been launched five years earlier. The Americans, however, wanted to substitute four-ball matches for foursomes, a form of the game rarely played in the host country even then.

The Americans also proposed that any match finishing all-square continue to sudden-death result, that two points instead of one be awarded for victories in two-man team events, and that both teams should be allowed to substitute a player in singles on the second day.

The British conceded only on the last point, for both captains had reason to anticipate that some line-up-juggling might be in order. George Gadd had become so violently seasick on the crossing that he had never fully recovered his form. He had played so poorly in practice rounds that at his own suggestion he was held out of competition, and ultimately did not participate in a match at Worcester. The Americans feared that Al Watrous, who was nursing what the local newspaper described as "a split finger," might be similarly indisposed.

"It is doubtful that Watrous will be able to play tomorrow," predicted the June 3rd Worcester Gazette, but as it turned out, he not only played but won in both the foursomes and the singles. It was Gene Sarazen who teamed with the ailing Watrous to win their foursomes match with Arthur Havers and Herbert Jolly, 3 and 2.

"One of the chief reasons for our failure was the superior putting of the American team," Ray told the Worcester Telegram after the first day's play. "They holed out much better than we did."

Hickey says that that was an understatement. "The British players were almost all better strikers of the ball than the Americans were," recalled Hickey. "Their short game just wasn't there."

Ted Ray's professed hopes for a big comeback in singles were dashed almost from the outset, as the Americans won going away.

Fred Whitcombe halved the day's last match with Sarazen to salvage half a point for the visitors, but even that outcome should probably be marked with an asterisk. Down five with nine to play, Sarazen had charged from behind to draw level on the penultimate hole. Aware that the competition had already become a rout, he sportingly (and intentionally, insists caddie Hill) three-putted the last to produce the tied result. The final result was a 9 1/2 2 1/2 triumph for the home side in the first-ever Ryder Cup, even though its benefactor never saw those matches.

"It was a few years later that I finally met Samuel Ryder himself," recalled Sarazen. "He was a great gentleman and a great lover of golf."

As was Gene Sarazen. The obituaries and tributes which have rolled off the presses for the past week ably chronicled his exploits - the double-eagle `two' on the 15th at Augusta that not only won him the 1935 tournament but put the Masters itself on the golfing map, the fact that he was one of four players (Hogan, Player, and Nicklaus being the others) to have won each of the modern `Grand Slam' events, his two eagles on the same hole in winning the 1932 British Open at Princes, his hole-in-one at Troon in the 1973 Open - but every golfer who has ever safely escaped a bunker should stop and pay him homage as well.

The way Sarazen told the story to my Boston Herald colleague Joe Gordon was that he had been taking flying lessons from Howard Hughes, the legendary billionaire playboy, movie magnate, and aviation pioneer. He was practising on Long Island when he mentally began to assimilate a correlation between the aerodynamic principle of lift, which Hughes had taught him, and what had up until then been his own poor bunker play.

"So I sent someone to the hardware store to buy all the solder they could get," Sarazen told Gordon. "I stayed in the bunker all day, adding solder and filing it off."

Sarazen unveiled the club that emerged as the product of that day's experimentation at the Prince's course that summer, and won the Open using it. For want of a better name, he called it a "sand wedge." No golfer today could live without one.